Sierra Hotel Blog
When Space Shuttle Columbia touched down at Edwards AFB on April 14, 1981 after her STS-1 maiden flight, nobody knew how close disaster had come. An overpressure wave from the solid rocket booster had damaged the heat shield and forced the body flap 5° beyond safe limits — a hydraulic rupture would have made controlled descent impossible. Commander John Young later admitted they would have ejected had they known.
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Margaret Heafield Hamilton led development of the on-board flight software for the Apollo space program at MIT. Three minutes before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, her software’s priority-based asynchronous executive averted a mission abort by managing a computer overload caused by a faulty radar input. Margaret Hamilton saved Apollo 11.
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On January 27, 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 — Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee — were lost in a command module cabin fire during a pre-launch plugs-out test at Launch Complex 34, Cape Canaveral. The pure oxygen atmosphere at 16.7 psi turned the cabin into an inferno. The tragedy led to sweeping redesigns of the Apollo spacecraft and forever changed NASA’s approach to crew safety.
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